As the economy continues to rebound from the Great Recession and as interest in urban living continues to build, many cities across the country are seeing a rebound in their fortunes. But who benefits from this resurgence?
A new study from the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program released last week seeks to provide some answers to that question in 100 cities around the country by measuring economic activity in each from 2009 to 2014. Cincinnati’s results in that study are simultaneously promising and troubling.
The Queen City ranks squarely in the middle of those 100 cities when it comes to overall economic growth. But there’s more to the picture than just raw economic activity. The Brookings study also considered prosperity: that is, the degree to which increases in economic activity benefit individuals; and inclusion, which is defined by how much that prosperity extends across different groups of people.
Cincinnati ranked well on those two measures — 18th and 19th, respectively. But there are some caveats to those rankings. What’s more, the city ranks near the bottom of the list — 81st — when it comes to racial inclusion in economic prosperity.
What does each category measure? Brookings’ prosperity ranking considers productivity, average annual wage and the standard of living in each city. Inclusion measures the median wage, relative poverty — or poverty measured by the percentage of people below 50 percent of the area median wage — and employment rate in each city. The study’s racial inclusion research considered those factors for non-white groups in each city.
It’s worth noting that economic inclusion is actually trending downward in many cities across the country and that a high ranking doesn’t mean cities are necessarily headed in the right direction. Eighty of the 100 cities in the study saw wages fall. Fifty-three saw relative poverty rise. Cincinnati’s relatively high ranking on the inclusion list comes even though median wages here have fallen in the past five years by 1.4 percent and are still below the levels they were at in 1999. There’s good news, too, of course: The number of jobs and standards of living are up and relative poverty here fell from its Great Recession peak in 2009 through 2013. But that number began rising again in 2014.
Thus, overall inclusion in Cincinnati post-recession can be described as a mixed bag at best, though we’re clearing faring better than many other major cities.
That is, except for one very important category. The most troubling numbers for Cincinnati come from the study’s ranking of how economically inclusive cities are by race. Here, the city is at the bottom of the heap, though it should be noted that five other Ohio cities — Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown, Dayton and Akron — are ranked even lower. That begs a question for another day: Why are Ohio cities so economically segregated? Statewide policy probably plays some role, but there might be other factors at play.
Meanwhile, Cincinnati’s ranking is low for a very simple reason: because wages here are going down for blacks and up for whites, while poverty levels in the city do the inverse.
Median yearly wages for non-whites in the city fell from $25,081 to $24,202 between 2009 and 2014, even as wages for whites rose from $32,714 to $35,295. That’s a 3.5 percent drop compared to an 8 percent gain. What’s more, relative poverty among non-whites in Cincinnati rose from 33 percent to 37 percent in that time period, while poverty for whites fell from 27.5 percent to 25.7 percent. Poverty for non-whites in Cincinnati increased by 4 percent and decreased for whites by nearly 2 percentage points.
What that means is that the economic gaps already present in Cincinnati are rising. There have been efforts to address this — new development aimed at low-income residents in neighborhoods like Avondale, for instance, and the city’s recently created Department of Economic Inclusion.
Beyond all the numbers, though, the continuing disparity is causing a great deal of frustration in the community, as this week’s Xavier University town hall discussion on race relations in the aftermath of the 2001 civil unrest showed. As Brookings’ study shows, the deeper economic issues many panelists and community members highlighted at that forum are real and growing.
This article appears in Feb 3-10, 2016.